Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 11

Finding the Worth While in the Southwest 11

Visitors who allow themselves to be hurried up to the Hopi towns the day

before the Snake Dance and then packed off home the next morning, as

most of them do, may think they have had a good time, but it is largely

the bliss of ignorance. They do not know what they have missed by not

spending a week or two. To be sure accommodations are limited and

primitive, but one must expect to rough it more or less in Indian

country. Still the Hopis are not savages and one can be made

comfortable. It is generally possible to rent one of the small houses at

the foot of the mesa, if one does not bring one’s own camp outfit, and

there are traders at most of the villages where supplies of necessaries

may be obtained. Climb the trail to the sunny, breeze-swept mesa top;

get acquainted with the merry, well-behaved little children—easy enough,

particularly if you have a little stock of candy; watch the women making

_piki_ (the thin wafer-like corn-bread of many colors that is the Hopi

staff of life), or molding or burning pottery; see the men marching off,

huge hoes on shoulder, to cultivate their corn and beans, sometimes

miles away, in damp spots of the desert, or coming inward-bound driving

burros laden with firewood or products of the field. All this, in an

architectural setting that is as picturesque as Syria, replete with

entrancing “bits” that are a harvest to the artist or the kodaker. After

a day or two you will have had your measure pretty well taken by the

population, and granting your manners have been decent, you will be

making friends, and every day will show you something new in the life of

this most interesting race. Of course there is a difference in the

different towns—the customs of some have been more modified than others

by contact with the whites and the influence of the Government

educational system. The Walpians and their neighbors are perhaps the

most Americanized; the people of Hótavila and Shimópovi, the least so.

 

The Hopis possess arts of great interest. Pottery of beautiful form and

design is made at Hano[60] of the First Mesa. This tiny village has the

honor of being the home of the most famous of Indian potters, Nampéyo,

whose work is so exquisite that it looks distinctive in any company. Her

daughter Kwatsoa seems nearly as gifted. Then there is basketry.

Curiously enough the East Mesa makes no baskets whatever, and the

baskets of the Middle Mesa are quite of another sort from those of the

Third Mesa, and both so different from all other Indian baskets

whatsoever, as to be recognized at a glance. The Third Mesa baskets are

woven wicker work usually in the form of a tray or plaque, the design

symbolizing birds, clouds, butterflies, etc., in glaring aniline dyes.

Those of the Second Mesa are in heavy coils sewed together with a thread

of the yucca wrapping, and in various shapes from flat to globular, the

latter sometimes provided with handles. Weaving is an ancient Hopi art

that is now unfortunately decadent. In pre-Spanish days and for some

time afterwards, the Hopi cultivated a native cotton,[61] and cotton is

still woven by them into ceremonial kilts and cord. Formerly they were

famous weavers of rabbit-skin blankets. The visitor may still run across

an occasional one in the pueblos, but the blanket of wool has long since

displaced them. The Hopis make of weaving a man’s business, which is

usually carried on in the _kivas_ when these are not being used for

religious purposes. They specialize in women’s _mantas_, or one-piece

dresses, of a dark color with little or no ornamentation.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER X

THE PETRIFIED FOREST OF ARIZONA

 

 

Everybody enjoys his stop off at the Petrified Forest. For one thing,

this sight is as easy of achievement as falling off a log, and that

counts heavily with your average American tourist. Even if your train

drops you at Adamana[62] in the middle of the night, as some trains do,

there will be somebody there to carry your bag and pilot you the couple

of hundred yards to the lone hotel which, with the railroad station and

the water tank, is practically all there is of Adamana. Then you are put

comfortably to bed in a room that awaits you. In the morning you are

given a leisurely breakfast at your own hour, and packed in an

automobile to see one part of the Forest; brought home to luncheon; and

in the afternoon motored off to another part. If you are an invalid or

just naturally lazy, you need not even leave your seat in the

conveyance. After that it is your choice to proceed on your travels, or

stay over another day and visit more distant parts of the Forest. In

seeing the Forest, you incidentally have several miles of reasonably

easy driving over the vast northern Arizona plateau with its wide views

to the edge of a world hemmed in with many a dreamy mountain range and

long, colorful, flat-topped mesas breaking away in terraces and steps to

the plains. You will quite possibly see coyotes and jackrabbits and

prairie dogs, cattle grazing the wild grasses, a Navajo Indian or two,

cowboys on their loping ponies, perhaps a round-up with its trailing

chuckwagon. You will steep yourself in the delicious Arizona sunshine,

and be humbled before the majesty of the glorious Arizona sky, blue as

sapphire and piled high at times with colossal masses of cumulus clouds

that forevermore will mean Arizona to you.

 

The Forest is unfortunately mis-named, for it is not a forest. There is

not a single standing trunk, such as you may see occasionally in Utah or

the Yellowstone. In the midst of a treeless plain the broken logs litter

the ground in sections rarely over 25 feet long, oftenest in short

chunks as if sawn apart, and in chips and splinters innumerable. Trunk

diameters of 2 or 3 feet are common, and as high as 6 feet has been

reported. It seems likely that the trees did not grow where they now lie

but have been washed hither in some prehistoric swirl of waters, (as

logs are carried down stream in our latter-day puny freshets,) becoming

stranded in certain depressions of the land where we now find them,

often having had their woody tissue gradually replaced by silica and

agatized. Whence they came nobody knows, nor when. The guess of the

unlettered guide who shows you about, may be as near right as the

trained geologist’s, who locates the time of their fall as the Triassic

Age, and their old home as perhaps beside some inland sea; but whether

that was one million years ago or twenty, who can say, further than that

they surely antedate the appearance of man upon this planet. The trees

are evidently of different sorts, but mostly conifers apparently related

to our present day araucarias, of which the Norfolk Island pine is a

familiar example. Mr. F. H. Knowlton, botanist of the Smithsonian

Institution, identifies then as _Araucarioxylon Arizonicum_, an extinct

tree once existing also in the east-central United States.[63] Limbs and

branches in anything approaching entirety are not found—only the trunks

and infinite fragments are here. The coloration due to the presence of

iron oxides in the soil at the time of silicification is often

exquisite, in shades of pink, yellow, blue, brown, crimson—a never

failing source of delight to visitors. Dr. L. F. Ward, of the United

States Geological Survey, has said that “there is no other petrified

forest in which the wood assumes so many varied and interesting forms

and colors.... The state of mineralization in which much of this wood

exists almost places it among the gems or precious stones. Not only are

chalcedony, opals and agates found among them, but many approach the

condition of jasper and onyx.”[64]

 

The parts of the Forest that tourists usually visit are the so-called

First Forest, about 6 miles south of Adamana (which contains the huge

trunk that spans a picturesque chasm 45 feet wide, and is known as the

Natural Bridge[65]); the Second Forest, 2½ miles further south; and the

North Forest. The last is 9 miles due north from Adamana, at the edge of

such a chaotic, burned-out bit of volcanic waste, as is in itself worth

seeing, breaking away gradually into the Painted Desert. If for any

reason, your time is too limited to admit of your visiting more than one

section of the Forest, by all means, let that section be this North

Forest. The trees are less numerous and the fragments are less

strikingly colored than in the parts to the south, but that background

of color and mystery given by the desert, lends a fascination and gives

to the picture a composition that is unique and unforgettable.

 

There is, moreover, the so-called Third or Rainbow Forest,[66] 13 miles

southwest of Adamana. This region contains the most numerous and the

largest trunks, some of them (partially underground) measuring upwards

of 200 feet in length. The especially rich coloring of the wood here has

given rise to the local name “Rainbow.”

 

In several parts of the Petrified Forest (a large portion of which is

now, by the way, a National Monument), are the ruins of many small

prehistoric Indian villages. The relics found indicate that four

different stocks of Indians have lived among these shattered trees, one

clearly Hopi, another probably Zuñian, the others undetermined (one

apparently of cannibalistic habits). Dr. Walter Hough has written very

entertainingly of this human interest of the Petrified Forest in

Harpers’ Magazine for November, 1902. The houses of the Rainbow Forest

were unique in aboriginal architecture in that they were constructed of

petrified logs. To quote Dr. Hough: “It is probable that prehistoric

builders never chose more beautiful stones for the construction of their

habitations than the trunks of the trees which flourished ages before

man appeared on the earth. This wood agate also furnished material for

stone hammers, arrowheads and knives, which are often found in ruins

hundreds of miles from the Forest.”[67]

 

[Illustration]

 

IN THE NORTH PETRIFIED FOREST

 

Near Adamana, Arizona. A glimpse of the famous Painted Desert in the

background.

 

[Illustration]

 

A CORNER IN SANTA FE, N. M.

 

The New Mexican capital retains to this day many picturesque features of the Spanish and Mexican dominance.